The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Hannah Arendt

Democratic freedoms may be based on the equality of all citizens before the law; yet they acquire their meaning and function organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups or form a social and political hierarchy. The breakdown of the class system, the only social and political stratification of the European nation-states, certainly was ‘one of the most dramatic events in recent German history’fn18 and as favorable to the rise of Nazism as the absence of social stratification in Russia’s immense rural population (this ‘great flaccid body destitute of political education, almost inaccessible to ideas capable of ennobling action’fn19) was to the Bolshevik overthrow of the democratic Kerensky government.